Report positive sides of education - Blay

Accra, Sept. 22, GNA - The Reverend Ama Afo Blay, Director-General of the Ghana Education Service (GES), on Monday appealed to the Ghanaian media to go beyond reporting on scandals in the Service and focus attention also on education development issues.

She said media reportage on misconduct in the Service, like teachers defiling pupils, embezzling of funds and parents attacking teachers drew attention of the GES Management for corrective measures.

It is, however, advisable that Journalists crosschecked their data to accurately project the performance of the Sector.

Reverend Afo Blay drew attention the issues in a speech read for her in Accra, at the beginning of a two-day training workshop for Senior Journalists on the coverage of education.

Ms Florence Darko, a Consultant at the GES, represented Rev Afo Blay, at the workshop, which the Working Group on Communication for Education and Development (COMED), of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa, organised with the assistance of the World Bank.

Reverend Afo Blay said the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE) programme introduced seven years ago, to consolidate the achievements of the 1987 educational reform, was steadily on course. She said since the introduction of the FCUBE, the performance of the Sector had not been that bad as projected by the media, a rather it was improving at a slow pace, adding that the gap between girls' enrolment to that of boys was also getting narrower.

The enrolment of girls, in some urban districts was even higher than that of boys, the GES Director General said.

Reverend Afo Blay stressed the need for active community participation in the management of schools. She spoke of a marked improvement in the performance of the Kushea and the Swedru L/A Junior Secondary Schools (JSS) after the community actively got involved in the schools' affairs.

Rev Afo Blay said the Kushea JSS, which did not have any candidate qualifying for admission into the Senior Secondary in 1997, had 92 per cent qualifying in 1998. She attributed the improved performance to the active participation of the community in the school's affairs based on revelations on GES monitoring mechanisms, the Performance Monitoring Test and School Performance Appraisal Meeting (SPAM). The SPAM, she said gave parents the opportunity to analyse the performance of their children and their schools in Standard Tests and also furnish the Ministry of Education with data on the performance of all public primary schools. The GES Director General said 70 per cent of the candidates of the Swedru JSS in 1999 passed to enter Senior Secondary School (SSS) while none passed in 1998. This, she said was after the community had asked for the removal of all the JSS teachers, and the District Director removed the Headteacher and replaced him with a more competent one.

Dr Mats Karlson, World Bank Country Director, stressed quality education as a strong basis for development and called for the strengthening of commitment to democratic culture, which he said demanded effective communication links to build a threshold effect. He announced that the country's development partners had come together to agree on 250 millions dollars, as general budget support for Ghana, and the Bank was providing 128 million dollars of the amount.

Dr Karlson said quality education needed a balanced approach and announced the support of the World Bank in a number of strategies to develop the capacity in the education sector.

The workshop, which aims at enhancing media interest and understanding of education, is to give national and regional media practitioners some attention before a sub-regional training conference on improving higher education in Sub-Saharan Africa that comes off in Accra from September 23 and to September 24.

Participants would reconvene on Friday, September 26 and review the coverage of the conference and recommend ways to improve media coverage of education in Ghana.